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AMD Radeon R9 290 Is Still A Wreck On Linux

Phoronix: AMD Radeon R9 290 Is Still A Wreck On Linux

Several days ago I published my review of the AMD Radeon R9 290 on Linux. While the graphics card is hopeful and has received a fair amount of praise on the Windows side, I found the current Linux performance to be troubling and offered bad OpenGL performance. On Friday AMD released a new Catalyst 13.11 beta and there was hope the R9 290 series performance was corrected, but that is not the case: the performance still is ridiculous on Linux.

While the R290 ist not working at its best in Linux up to now, and even if an older card will work with similar peformance for a lower price, is this really what one would name a wreck ? I certainly remember the poulsbo and other hardware alike, which is really a wreck at best. Please choose your headlines a little more serious and a little less biased. I always get the opinion you are just angry like a kid because you got no review cards for free from amd, which just also won't happen in future when you act like this.

It's sad but has been the way for a very long time, AMD do have people working on it but its not their main focus. Worringly due to the AMD chipsets in next gen consoles there focus may even further shift from Linux Desktops.

Good luck servicing end users AMD with a cloud / terminal desktop windows 10 without any decent graphics hardware needed. Also according to the head of sony the last consoles are this generation after that its streaming .

So if AMD lose windows and lose consoles in 8 - 10 years and have already declined to make any more enthusiast CPU's then what market do they have left? The market is fickle, apple could go intel only or nvidia or even Arm ?

It's sad but has been the way for a very long time, AMD do have people working on it but its not their main focus. Worringly due to the AMD chipsets in next gen consoles there focus may even further shift from Linux Desktops.

Good luck servicing end users AMD with a cloud / terminal desktop windows 10 without any decent graphics hardware needed. Also according to the head of sony the last consoles are this generation after that its streaming .

So if AMD lose windows and lose consoles in 8 - 10 years and have already declined to make any more enthusiast CPU's then what market do they have left? The market is fickle, apple could go intel only or nvidia or even Arm ?

It baffles me how AMD have managed to stay alive so long

Your comment is very egocentric. The only reason they're supporting linux is probably for openCL based servers and to shut up users who say "I paid for this I demand this work blah blah blah." Otherwise they really don't care about linux until Valve decides its time to get them involved in a Steam Machine. Enthusiast CPUs don't bring in enough profits, it's the the mainstream CPUs that get them the money and that's what AMD sells best. AMD GPUs are pretty good on Windows. The consoles likely got AMD to hire a group of new developers, and those driver devs aren't going to be very busy because it's going to be the same chip for 5 or so years. It won't be AMD's job to micro-optimize the drivers because doing so could cause regressions in other games. It also isn't AMD's job to work on APIs. So they have it pretty easy.

While the R290 ist not working at its best in Linux up to now, and even if an older card will work with similar peformance for a lower price, is this really what one would name a wreck

If a new near top of the line card comes out from AMD, offers far less the performance it does in windows and gets beaten by a mid range card by Nvidia that costs substantially less and uses a lot less power, I would say a "wreck" is an accurate description. Right now the 290 runs with the GTX 760 when it should be beating the GTX 770 handily.

Otherwise they really don't care about linux until Valve decides its time to get them involved in a Steam Machine.

So, why should Valve even consider that, seeing that AMD doesn't care to deliver drivers for Linux that have at least somewhat the quality the competitors are able to deliver?
I guess that AMD is making enough money that they don't have to care about something like that. Oh, wait ...

R9 290 vs gtx 680

At the moment the R9 290 sells at 350-400 € in germany
Nvidia has no 7xx card at this price point. But it has the gtx 680 sold also at 350-400 €.

The nvidia card is cooler, but has o 1GB RAM less, so it depends on what you prefer... a cool card, or a card that is a bit more future-proof in RAM.
While in the showed Benchmarks the GTX 680 is slightly ahead of the R9 290 most of the time, the R9 290 is better in OpenCL stuff.

So from this point of view the newer nvidia 7xx GTX wreck the R9 290, yes, but this comes with a higher price... if you go for the same price point its not that bad!
The problem for AMD is, that they are late. The R9 290 should have been out at the time the 680 GTX arrived. That would have been quite some competition!